I can appreciate that concern and see it even with flagging / dead / killed posts and submissions. I've had my own concerns about HN's moderation, both excesse

I can appreciate that concern and see it even with flagging / dead / killed posts and submissions. I've had my own concerns about HN's moderation, both excesses and insufficiencies. When I've done occasional polls about what people's issues are about HN I'm very often pointed to comments which now show as flagged. I'd found a few which hadn't been flagged and forwarded those to dang, who (admittedly long after the fact) flagged them. As dang's said many time, moderators don't see everything, most moderation is by members, and mods step in relatively rarely. Based on Whaly's 2021 analysis and looking at dang's own comment post history (via Algolia), HN nets roughly 4 million comments/year and 400k submissions, with about 150k active members. Over his ten years as moderator dang's averaged about 20 comments per day, though there's a great deal more moderation occurring (some automated, some member-based, some manual but not noted with comments, which tend to be reserved for established accounts). My read is that HN mostly tends toward its stated goals and, frankly, good-netizen behaviour. It does have a pronounced status-quo bias, though it seems to be self-aware on this point. I've a few further concerns I'm still thinking through. The problem with an overly-open archive is that this makes possible misconstrued assertions about what HN does or doesn't tolerate. An open-access archive and third-party apps which don't reflect moderation actions, say, a third-party app which explicitly only showed flagged, killed, and/or dead posts, comments, and users, would paint a distinctly different picture of HN, and one which would greatly harm the reputation of the site. There are some ... possible ways around this. HN uses sequentially-numbered IDs for posts and comments (both are treated the same so far as I can tell). UserIDs seem to have an internal representation which is similar (I've seen, for example, names which change over time), but the internal representation doesn't seem to be publicly exposed. If you want to find my own content you'd do it with "UserID=dredmorbius" and not by some numeric identifier. But the numeric content ID means that a determined scraper could walk (sequentially or randomly) through the entire database, pull out every post and comment, and then glue those back together. That's somewhat north of 40 million items presently.... (There are benefits to using sparse, random / arbitrary UUIDs for systems.)